The present invention relates generally to user interfaces for searching document sets, and more specifically to a graphical user interface (GUI) for navigating the Internet.
Many existing systems have been developed to enable a user to navigate through a set of documents, in order to find one or more of those documents which are particularly relevant to that user's immediate needs. For example, HyperTextMark-Up Language (HTML) permits web page designers to construct a web page that includes one or more “hyperlinks” (also sometimes referred to as “hot links”), which allow a user to “click-through” from a first web page to other, different web pages. Each hyperlink is associated with a portion of the web page, which is typically displayed in some predetermined fashion indicating that it is associated with a hyperlink.
While hyperlinks do provide users with some limited number of links to other web pages, their associations to the other web pages are fixed, and cannot dynamically reflect the state of the overall web with regard to the terms that they are associated with. Moreover, because the number of hyperlinks within a given web page is limited, when a user desires to obtain information regarding a term, phrase or paragraph that is not associated with a hyperlink, the user must employ another technique. One such existing technique is the search engine.
Search engines enable a user to search the World Wide Web (“Web”) for documents related to a search query provided by the user. Typical search engines operate through a Web Browser interface. Search engines generally require the user to enter a search query, which is then compared with entries in an “index” describing the occurrence of terms in a set of documents that have been previously analyzed, for example by a program referred to sometimes as a “web spider”. Entry of such a search query requires the user to provide terms that have the highest relevance to the user as part of the search query. However, a user generally must refine his or her search query multiple times using ordinary search engines, responding to the search results from each successive search. Such repeated searching is time consuming, and the format of the terms within each submitted query may also require the user to provide logical operators in a non-natural language format to express his or her search.
For the above reasons, it would be desirable to have a system for navigating through a document set, such as the Web, which allows a user to freely search for documents related to terms, phrases or paragraphs within a web page without relying on hyperlinks within the web page. The system should further provide a more convenient technique for internet navigation than is currently provided by existing search engine interfaces.